George Karaolides wrote:
>I'm now trying woody with root fs on reiserfs on LVM on software RAID-1.
>The woody reiserfs install disks were handy for this. Haven't done much
>more than successfully install and boot the system, though; tests are
>still in the future.
>
>Just how much better is XFS than reiserfs at handling large files? As you
>observed, this is important for database systems. However, many databases
>can use raw devices rather than file systems, and with LVM you have the
>flexibility to change the disk space allocated to a logical volume
>device without re-partitioning disks.
XFS is far better if I may say, as it was such by design. Its good handling of multiple file streaming is quite a blessing when used with large databases
(growing bigger with each passing time) that employ multiple transactions and
file updates to the database. Anyway, XFS can be used with LVM. It's
not merely on size alone, but how it handles multiple data streams.
Anyway, I like all 3 of them. For the server, mainly use XFS due to large file
and multiple stream handling, as well as mature ACL support. ReiserFS I employ
with the /tmp's and cache server wherein files come and go. Ext3 I use for
workstations and intermittently-powered machines. At home, same combo though
I employ ext3 in /home and ReiserFS in /usr instead of XFS. In /home simply
because I've got no need for ACLs for my personal box, and in /usr because of
some nasty behavior of XFS when I installed OpenOffice wherein the configs
get corrupted when you reboot the machine (some problem on committing journal
data or sync something which didn't manifest in ReiserFS or ext3, but I sticked
with ReiserFS since ext3 tends to get variably bigger with a journal that sizes
up variably), aside from the fact that it can generate file holes over time on
desktop machines.
Paolo Falcone
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